Competing Against Ms. Resistance

Morning. I had a very significant 15 or so hours, starting last night with another RIVETING Knicks game in which the Knicks came from behind to beat the Cavaliers. Lin played really well but the real story was the depth of the NY bench led by Novak. His string of 4th quarter 3 pointers was the turning point the Knicks needed to grab another victory.

I was so engaged and texted with my brother the entire time, starting early in the game when I suggested the coach clear the entire floor of the starters and bench them all until they are ready to play defense and start hustling and finishing with hoots, hollas and text "woo hoos".

After I went to bed and woke up this morning to get ready for my personal trainer, I had all these emotions. I USED to play a lot of basketball. I USED to play a lot of soccer. I USED to play team sports all the time and I MISS these things so much. I felt a new absence and the old absence of these and can honestly say that the training and workouts I do now are just not filling this void. In fact, one of the things I loved about team sports is the competition element. There was another team against which to compete. I loved the the camaraderie on my own team. I loved that there were no mirrors. I love that it was about the SPORT and about playing, that looks never factored into the equation, that I never thought about belly fat when I was sprinting down the court or field. I loved how you could make mistakes and then recover so fast people didn't even remember you fell down. I loved getting up from a slide tackle with mud streaks on my shorts. :) I just loved playing.

3 ankle surgeries later and I don't have this in my life today. I had a talk with my personal trainer about goals and what I REALLY WANT, what motivates me and what gets me out of bed. Lets just say there are going to be some basketballs and soccer balls in my very near future. I'm a little nervous but I'm excited.

The other epiphany, if we want to call it that, concerns where to channel some of my competitive spirit. I do have an opposition voice that lives inside me and brings me down. It's the negative thinker that moves me into self defeat, overeating, stress/anxiety and defeat. It is louder than what I grew up with as a child but softer than what I struggled with in my 20s. What I am doing now is approaching that voice -- Ms. Resistance (read The War of Art) -- as a competitive element in me. And my objective is victory.

I keep score and this has nothing to do with anybody else. Maybe the gift of stopping team sports for as long as I did, one of the gifts anyway, is to recognize how I can compete with my own self sabotaging voice with the same spirit I used to compete against other players on the pitch. Maybe one of the reasons why I have not felt comfortable is because that wonderful competitive spirit which I could be embracing is one I've tried to stifled or worse, one that I've used to COMPARE myself to other people doing similar things to me.

That kind of competition is futile.

Jeremy Lin used to play a game against a ghost. Well, not exactly, but here's how the New York Times put it in an article, Jeremy Lin's Evolution:

Lin’s perfectionist tendencies came out in a 3-point-shooting drill called “beat the ghost,” in which Lin earned 1 point for every shot he made at the arc and the “ghost” earned 3 points for every shot Lin missed.

If I play a game against Ms. Resistance each day, it would probably be about which good habits I keep and which ones I break. It would look like which thoughts I choose to practice -- yes, thinking is a practice -- and which ones I choose to let go of because they're not serving me. I can tell by how I feel and what I do if Ms. Resistance is scoring points against me...or, vice versa.

I expect very big changes are on the way. I know they are and that's because I embracing all of me and using every part of my being to find success and empowerment. It's all a day at a time

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